I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading

and how within six months his wife had left him. He told me that he got restless and irritable whenever he couldn’t trade – like on Sundays, for example, or in the

middle of the night – and that trading had effectively become his entire life. He went on to say that he was incapable of accumulating cash in his account and often didn’t

even bother to open his brokerage statements.

‘Because you don’t want to face up to the extent of your losses?’ I said.

He nodded.

Then he went deeper into confessional mode and started talking about his addictive personality and how if it hadn’t been one thing in his life it had been another …

During all of this, the only thing I could think of was how sublime, how like a brief but intricate jazz solo that little fifteen-second passage of electronic commerce had

been. Pretty soon, I couldn’t even make out what Holland was saying any more, not clearly, because I was gone, lost in a sudden, intoxicating reverie of possibilities.

Holland, I realized, had been stumbling around in the dark, shaving off the occasional sixteenth of a point here or there, quite obviously getting it wrong more often than

he was getting it right. But this wasn’t going to be the case with me. I would know what to do instinctively. I would know what stocks to buy, and when to buy them,

and why.

I would be good at this.

*

When I eventually got away and returned to Tenth Street, my head was still reeling. But then, when I opened the door of the apartment and stepped into the livingroom,

I immediately felt oppressed, felt outsized – like Alice, like I’d soon be curling an arm round my head and sticking an elbow out of the window, just to fit in the

place. I began to feel somewhat aggrieved, too, as though impatient that I hadn’t already made lots of money from day-trading – aggrieved and in desperate visceral

need of things … another new suit, a couple of new suits, and shoes, several pairs of them, as well as new shirts and ties, and maybe other new stuff, a better hi-fi

system, a DVD player, a laptop, proper air-conditioning, and just more rooms, more corridor space, higher ceilings. I had the nagging sense that unless I was moving

forward, moving up, unless I was transmuting, transmogrifying, morphing into something else, I was probably going to, I don’t know, explode …

I put on the scherzo from Bruckner’s Ninth and marched around the apartment, like a one-man panzer division, muttering to myself, weighing up the options. How

was I to move forward? How was I to get started? But I soon realized that I didn’t have too many options, because the money in the closet had dwindled to a few

thousand dollars, which was about as much as there was in my bank account – and since, let’s face it, a few thousand dollars plus a few thousand dollars is still, for all

intents and purposes, a few thousand dollars, all I had in the world, then, apart from a credit card, was a few thousand dollars.

Taking what was left in the closet in any case, I went out shopping again. This time I headed for Forty-seventh Street and bought two fourteen-inch TV sets, a laptop

computer and three software packages – two for investment-analysis and one for online trading. Disregarding Bob Holland’s idea that too much information led to

conflicting signals, I bought the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the latest issues of

The Economist, Barrons, Newsweek, The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, Variety and about ten other weekly and monthly titles. I

also got a handful of foreign-language newspapers, ones I’d at least be able to take some kind of a stab at – Il Sole 24 Ore and Corriera della Sera, obviously – but

also Le Figaro, El Pais and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Back in my apartment, I phoned a friend who was an electrical engineer and had him instruct me over the phone about how to splice the wires from the two new TV

sets into my existing cable connection. He was very uncomfortable about it and wanted to come round and do it himself, but I insisted that he just explain it to me,

goddammit – explain it to me over the phone and let me take notes. It was an entirely different matter, OK, from what I might have ventured to do under normal

circumstances – change a plug, say, or replace a fuse – but I nevertheless managed to carry out his instructions, rapidly, and to the letter, and as a result I soon had the

three TV sets operating side-by-side in the living-room. After that, I hooked up the new laptop to the computer on my desk, installed the software and went online. I

did some research into Internet stockbrokers, and used my credit card and a bank transfer to open an account with one of the smaller companies. I then took the

newspapers and magazines I’d bought and carefully spread them out around the apartment. I put reading material, open at relevant pages, on to every available surface

– desk, table, chairs, shelves, couch, floor.

*

The next few hours flitted by in what felt like a couple of seconds. I spent them hovering anxiously in front of the five screens, absorbing information – and at a rate that

made my previous efforts seem positively glacial. The three TV sets were beaming out different news and financial-service transmissions – CNN, CNNfn and CNBC –

different tributaries into the one great global flood of information, analysis and opinion. The online broker I’d registered with – The Klondike Index – provided real-time

quotes, expert commentary, news updates and hyperlinks to a variety of research tools and simulation games. On the other computer screen, I visited sites like

Bloomberg, The Street.com., Quote.com, Raging Bull and The Motley Fool. I also occasionally took time out to dive-bomb over the acres of newsprint I’d

accumulated, and read articles about anything and everything … Mexico, naturally, but also about genetically modified foods, peace talks in the Middle East, Britpop,

the downturn in the steel industry, Nigerian crime statistics, e-commerce, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Basque separatists, the international banana trade …

Whatever.

Of course, I had no real idea of what I was doing here, there was no coherent strategy, it was all random, but I’d gravitated to this notion that the more data there

was stored in my brain – and wide-ranging data – the more confident I would be when the time actually came to take some of those fabled split-second decisions.

And – come to that – what was I waiting for? I didn’t have much latitude, financially, but if I’d really wanted to, I could have been trading online within a matter of

seconds. To place an order, all I had to do was select a stock, enter data about the type of transaction and number of shares required, and then click the Send Order

button on the screen.